The boiling red crest blocked out the sun, casting a bloody shadow across five miles of churning riverbank.
Trees along the gorge bluffs burst into flames from the radiant heat before the water even reached them.
“Form on the stone dike,” Sera Thorne shouted, her voice cutting through the roar of cascading mud. “All thirty patriarchs, link your foundation wards.”
Thirty sect patriarchs, their embroidered robes billowing in the scorching wind, leaped onto the heavy granite levee.
Patriarch Shen planted his sect’s nine-ring bronze staff into the central masonry, his knuckles white with strain.
Beside him, Patriarch Mu and Patriarch Hong drove twelve jade array spikes into the mortar, channeling their collective Nascent Soul Qi into a single, seamless barrier.
“Do not let the wave touch the mooring,” Patriarch Shen yelled, his long white beard whipping in the gale. “If the Young Master’s barge takes water, our entire alliance drowns with it.”
Behind them, sixty thousand Free Cauldron Alliance soldiers formed interlocking shield walls along the secondary earthen berms.
